Trans Girl Suicide Museum

The first English translation of Leslie Kaplan's crystalline novella Miss Nobody Knows, about the lived aftermath of May '68: its hopes and failures and how they continue to resonate today.

“Ostensibly about the May '68 strike and a man who cannot deal with its aftermath, but really a love story to these moments when suddenly the utopian comes into view and no longer feels impossible. It’s a book to read right now so as to remember that there have been moments when people come together in the name of possibility, rather than in rage.” —Juliana Spahr

“Thank you for sending Leslie Kaplan's book, so strong and graceful, so… so… so… as if the novel were suspended between the animal and the human.” —Jean-Luc Godard, letter to Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens

“One thought he understood it all, the other wanted to see it all. Through two opposing characters, Leslie Kaplan brings to life something of May '68 … This novel breaks an opening out of the infinitely mad universe that was captured by Leslie Kaplan's first book, Excess-The Factory.” —Claire Devarrieux, Libération

JEB (Joan E. Biren) first introduced viewers to her photographs in 1979 when she published Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians, a groundbreaking celebration of women loving women. In the years that followed, JEB collaborated with poets, musicians, filmmakers, elected officials, healthcare providers, factory workers, spiritual leaders, and others who built communities and worked for political change. Her second book Making a Way: Lesbians Out Front, published in 1987, depicts the spirit and energy of this movement in more than a hundred emotionally resonant photographs that take us from passionate activism to thoughtful solitude, while remarks and remembrances from each woman photographed deepen the historic record. This reissue of Making a Way adds insightful new essays by Cheryl Clarke and JD Samson, resulting in an essential document of an era whose impact continues to be felt across our society today.

This book is built of stories and provocations—like the birth of a pearl, it transforms that which irritates, layer by layer.

Through speculative fiction and critical essays, Pear Nuallak explores what happens when messy, desiring bodies collide with the hard edge of power. The world’s neat categories are unmade and rewritten, revealing that racial capitalism’s myths are just as much fantasies as Thai bird princesses and transgender magic.

Moving playfully across folktale, horror, satire and critique, Nuallak examines how different beings are formed politically, bodily and emotionally. We discover interdimensional fungi resisting colonisation, queer monsters living on Hampstead Heath, and a mysterious canal running through the ruins of capitalism into interstitial realms. We test the borders of queer diasporic nationalism and take apart the racially melancholic memoir. In this fiery yet delicate collection, we aren’t bound by truth, but flow with it into new worlds.

Pear Nuallak is a visual artist and writer from London. They run community art workshops and co-organise a queer social hub with the Black Cap Community Benefit Society. Their writing has been published in The Dark and Interfictions. Pearls from Their Mouth is their first book.

Spring 2020. During lockdown in a mountain village with his partner and young child, Yann Chateigné Tytelman becomes haunted by the presence of his dead father. Provoked by memories of him, of their laconic relationship and of the class antagonisms that emerged between them – the father was a manual labourer while his son ‘turned his back’ and entered the art world – Chateigné Tytelman starts writing letters, piles of them, which have as their subject that most mystical, most incomprehensible of phenomena: silence.    

Condensed into a series of short fragments, Blackout interweaves the letter to the father with the observations of an art theorist who surveys with precision the occurrences and experiences of silence in painting, music, literature and philosophy.

A partly autobiographical novel that the German surrealist artist and author Unica Zürn (1916-1970) wrote for her ten-year-old daughter in 1953, although it would never be published in her lifetime. This is the first translation of the tale from German into English.

Unica Zürn tells the story of fifteen-year-old motherless Katrin, an aspiring writer, who lives with her father, also a writer. The novel is set in an imaginary world, a metropolis called Linit, split into three levels: Oberstadt (Hightown), Mittelstadt (Middletown) and Unterstadt (Lowtown), overlooked by a Volcano where the artists live and crossed by the river Emil. Presented as a book for children, apparently written for her own daughter (named Katrin), Katrin also draws on the personal biography of Zürn herself, in terms of her relationship with her father and the city of Berlin after WWII, and her experience with people on the margins of a society characterised by great tensions.

About Unica Zürn 
Nora Berta "Unika" Ruth Zürn, originally known as Ruth, was born on 6 July 1916 in Berlin. Raised in Berlin, Zürn had a contentious relationship with her mother, while she idolized her absent father. While at school she published her first short stories in magazines for young people, and in 1933 she began to work at the UFA film studios in Berlin (acronym for Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft, a major German film company producing and distributing motion pictures from 1917 until the end of the Nazi era). In 1942 she married and had two children, Katrin and Christian. Shortly after, she lost the custody of her children. For the next few years she survived by writing short stories for newspapers and radio plays. After the war, she became part of the Bohemian group of Berlin and began to call herself Unika (after her aunt Unika Pudor). She frequented the artistic milieu revolving around the DADA-surrealist cabaret Die Badewanne ("The Bathtub"). In 1953, Zürn met the artist Hans Bellmer, best known for his disassembled dolls in unconventional poses directed at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany, and became his muse. They lived together in Paris for many years, albeit in a conflictual relationship. Zürn concentrated on producing poetic anagrams supplemented by drawings, thus developing her own multidimensional surreal style. From the late 1950s, she suffered from forms of anxiety, later diagnosed as schizophrenia, and produced a wealth of remarkable textual and visual material while in psychiatric institutions across Germany and France. From 1956 to 1964, Zürn had four solo exhibitions of her drawings, and her work was included in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme. The exploration of the unconscious dimension would increasingly lose its liberating, positive aspect and turn into a fixation on a narrow space, one in which the self is tormented by distressing visions. Her psychological difficulties inspired much of her writing, especially Der Mann im Jasmin (The Man of Jasmine, published in English in 1971). Other published texts by Zürn include Hexentexte (1954) and Dunkler Frühling (Dark Spring, 1967). Zürn died on 19 October 1970 in Paris, throwing herself from the sixth floor.